Continuing through June 7, 2026.
“ektor garcia lives and works nomadically.” So reads the wall text at the entrance to his sculptural installation “loose ends.” This romanticizing statement aligns garcia’s practice with those of migratory peoples who use whatever might be at hand to craft portable objects. That process comes to the fore in this eclectic exhibition. garcia’s choice of lowercase characters for his name, titles of his works, and the exhibition title underscores that idea, downplaying the role of ego and shunning any hierarchy of materials or processes. Using the scourings of a restless life, he creates and recreates objects that flout common assumptions about art versus craft, gender identity, and the nature of museum-ready works of art.
As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, garcia first experimented with crocheting. He describes the technique as a single line that turns into a spiral with the potential for unbounded variation and growth. This is borne out in works using artificial sinew, leather strips, or copper wire — anything but yarn.
Raffia, stoneware, dried pigs’ ears, glass, ostrich feathers, and velvet ribbons also turn up in “loose ends.” So too do limpet shells from Oaxaca, bicycle inner tubes, and wild clay dug up in San Jose, evoking an unsettled life. Objects are wrapped, cast, dyed, draped, welded or knotted. Most are laid out or hung above a large platform, next to tools like crochet hooks and salvaged raw materials such as twisted wires, copper sheets, and silver string. Ribbons of artificial sinew droop from one piece to another or simply tail off. In the artist’s way of thinking, nothing is discrete or definitive, only paused, to be picked up again later and reworked at his discretion. “loose ends” feels less like a museum installation than like a view inside the artist’s ever-curious mind.
“wreath and chains” (2022/2025) is a loosely tethered ring of clumped and coiled horsehair, copper wire, and borosilicate glass fibers. Both mournful and festive, it mixes natural and industrial materials, notably copper to stunning effect. That mineral abounds in garcia’s work, serving to link the history of copper mining with the tradition of handcrafting with copper in his native Mexico.
The exhibition is laced with this and other cultural allusions. “leather bike” (2025) invokes queer leather culture. The mother of pearl buttons in “PLUR” (2025) line up as shorthand for “Peace Love Unity Respect,” the guiding principles of rave culture. Butterflies often appear, recalling those depicted in Mesoamerican murals and codices. garcia clearly relates to their transformative nature and, in the case of monarch butterflies, their two-way migration between Mexico and the US.
The multipart “cortina y tapete salmon” (2025) counts among the works that take inspiration from the artist’s memories of doilies handcrafted by his grandmother. Spurning gendered sexist clichés — feminine, decorative, tedious — garcia powers up the practice of crocheting. One intricately patterned and skillfully worked panel, the cortina, hangs in front of a window. Dangling from a wire at the bottom are a tiny shell and a pearl that in this context read as a tear. Ribbon-like fabric links this large panel to a smaller one draped over a window ledge. A third panel with a different pattern, the tapete, lies on the floor like a throw rug. Its final row coils off, still attached to the roll of crochet fabric and hook from which it was woven. The present and future unspool from memories of the past.
Beyond the large platform, at the opposite end of the gallery, is a second platform. It serves as a base for the gossamer “cuprum” (2024). Over 12 feet long by nearly 5 feet wide, this masterwork of crocheting is created mostly from fine gauge copper wire. (cuprum is Latin for copper.) It comprises dozens of doilies in various patterns, sizes, and colors. Laid out like a ceremonial garment, “cuprum” has a spiritual presence. The copper gleams. The imagery reads as a personal cosmography in which the doilies are also mandalas. The one at the foot of the work has a butterfly and spider motif. Others conjure hands, water, and flora. One at its crown resembles a solar headdress.
There’s an additional element in “cuprum”: a glass rectangle hanging from the ceiling and framed with crocheted copper wire. It acts as a blank mirror, prompting us to see in it whatever it reflects. Like so much of garcia’s work, its frame too has a tail. In every other respect, “cuprum” tidies up the artist’s many “loose ends.”
